The Digital Life of Salman Rushdie

In 2006, the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), at Emory University, acquired the archive of Salman Rushdie. The collection included the usual papers and letters along with a trove of Rushdie’s digital materials, including his personal computers (one desktop and three laptops, as well as a hard drive), and an agreement to donate all his subsequent digital effects to the library. As Benjamin Moser noted in his post about the Susan Sontag archives, the influx of digital written material has presented a challenge to archivists: Outside of just setting a computer on a table like some sort of oversized paperweight, how does one present a writer’s computer to the public?

The oldest computer in Rushdie’s collection is a Macintosh Performa 5400/180. The library prohibits visitors from turning it on and searching, in person, through the files, but, as it turns out, it’s possible to make a visitor feel as if they were looking through it. The Rushdie Born-Digital Archives Working Group, a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, librarians, and archivists at Emory University engaged in a unique effort in digital archiving to build an “emulator” to allow MARBL visitors to see what was on Rushdie’s desktop on the last day that he typed at the machine. (In truth, it’s not the entire contents: various personal records were removed before the archive was made public.) A copy of the final state of the laptop is made, and, in a MARBL reading room, a user on a much newer Apple laptop can wander through Rushdie’s files.

The experience of poking around an early computer environment, with its block fonts, file icons, and backdrops, can inspire a special sort of nostalgia, especially for those nerdy and old enough to remember their own first computer. Rushdie’s digital archive, in its old Mac setting, contains the usual ephemera of his life: bank statements, newspaper articles, drafts of stories, at least one screenplay, and even folders called “NAMES FOR NEW CHILD” and “Puppet Motel Folder.” These digital things come with their own form of marginalia, some of which have presumably been collected in the “STICKIES 1999” folder. There is even a “Games” folder, so you can see what Rushdie was playing while working under a fatwa.

Photograph courtesy Emory Photo/Video.

But not all digital archive problems can be solved with such elegant solutions. Outdated floppy disks and hard drives can be impenetrable to current technologies. The poet Lucille Clifton, for example, who has her archives at MARBL, worked on a VideoWriter, an early-generation word processor that has long since gone out of use. One of Clifton’s floppy disks could not be read by the miraculously still-working VideoWriter she also donated to the library or by today’s computers. Instead, its magnetically encoded information had to be extracted by something called the KryoFlux Floppy Controller, which records the pattern of ones and zeros stored on the disk. This is far from a fix; the KryoFlux only creates a magnetic map of the disc, but the technology does not yet exist to render the data found within, which means that the accessibility of Clifton’s words depends upon marbl’s ability to keep the old VideoWriter working and the floppy disks from disintegrating further.

Clifton’s VideoWriter, which looks like a small microwave oven with a keyboard, brings up another question for archivists: Does the machine itself have an effect on the work produced on it? In theory, the context should matter. The recent excitement over Emily Dickinson’s so-called “envelope poems” makes much of the choice of medium and the various constraints dictated by differently shaped surfaces. Does a writer produce the same novel with a phone as he would have had he used a laptop instead?

Rushdie could help to answer these questions, poised as he is on the cutting edge of modern media as it transitions from pen and paper to personal computers and now social media and the cloud. One can only presume that his next deposits at MARBL will include tweets and Instagram photos, which will be added to decades of his digital output. This wealth of data, all produced by one man, should allow scholars to investigate the nuances in his process and how they might have been affected by the rapidly changing technology.